by David Brock
After 141 often self-contradictory and unintelligible hit pieces over the course of twenty years, the readership of the New York Times has surely gotten Dowd’s one point: She hates Hillary Clinton.
By now, however, some smarter conservatives are beginning to realize that blatant sexism can backfire.
As Republican strategist Katie Packer Gage told Hanna Rosin of the Atlantic, “Women have this feeling that the world—and particularly this town—is run by men, and if something comes across as mean or unfair, they want to rush to her defense.”
Another Republican strategist, Kelly Ann Conway, was reportedly working with focus groups to perfect the attack on Hillary not as a woman but as “that woman.”
So, clearly, such personal attacks are not off the table, and conservatives won’t refrain from engaging in lines of attack that subtly remind their audience of their favorite stereotype.
The truth is the Republicans can’t help themselves. As Jessica Valenti observed in the Washington Post, “When misogyny is part of your ideology, it’s hard to muzzle.” In other words, no matter how sly the Republicans are in making their sexist attacks, what they can’t hide is that their anti-Hillary agenda is part and parcel of their antiwoman agenda—against abortion rights, birth control, equal pay for women, universal preschool, and child care. It’s an agenda poised to alienate women voters especially.
And who better to underscore what’s at stake for women in the next election than candidate Hillary Clinton?
A candidate who has spent four decades, from the Children’s Defense Fund in the 1970s through her tenure as secretary of state, fighting for the disenfranchised, particularly women and girls.
A candidate who ended her last campaign for presidency by citing eighteen million cracks—the number of votes she got in the Democratic primaries—in “that highest, hardest glass ceiling.”
A candidate who, in her first remarks after leaving the State Department, addressed “the untapped potential of women around the world.”
A candidate who announced her 2016 bid, saying, “I may not be the youngest person in this race, but I’ll be the youngest woman president in the history of the United States.”
At Media Matters we will, of course, be on the lookout for examples of both blatant and more subtle sexism from the right during Hillary’s 2016 campaign. Glenn Beck, for example, wonders whether Hillary shaves her face. But I’m less concerned with the Glenn Becks of the world and more concerned with the Maureen Dowds—less worried about some idiot with a talk show crossing the line and more worried about some widely-read columnist with a prominent position at a reputable outlet using it maliciously.
After all, while most Americans would probably recoil from the kind of grotesque attacks you can find if you wander into the fever swamps of the far right, many will see cable TV hosts and newspaper columnists refer to Hillary’s coldness or calculating nature without a second thought as to the root of such stereotypes. They’ll come to accept it as an article of faith that Hillary is overly ambitious, even though no one is saying that about the men who are running for president with far thinner résumés. They’ll watch pundits debate Hillary’s pantsuits instead of her policies, see her hair and makeup choices weighed as matters of state—and they may even participate in the conjecture without realizing how demeaning and ultimately damaging it can be for her candidacy.
That’s why, as much as we need to call out and expose the revolting rhetoric of the far right, we need to be just as on guard against mainstream journalists who—knowingly or not—parrot those clichés. The press has a role to play in holding candidates accountable. But we have a role to play in holding them accountable. For twenty years, it has been acceptable to deploy sexism against Hillary Clinton, to attack her not because of what she’s done or what she believes, but simply because of who she is.
The good news is that a new generation of online activists is poised to make a difference in 2016 with technologies that were still nascent in 2008. As Jessica Valenti noted in her Washington Post op-ed, today clips of Rush Limbaugh calling Sandra Fluke a slut, or Todd Akin talking about “legitimate rape” go viral and spur online outrage—and action. Citing a Time feature story on Hillary’s 2016 run that represented Hillary on the cover as a giant high heel crushing a tiny man and asking “Can Anyone Stop Hillary?”—which provoked a hugely negative backlash online—Valenti wrote:
Perhaps the biggest change surrounding women’s responses to political misogyny comes from the explosion of social media. Women on Twitter and Facebook shared their ire over the Time cover minutes after its release—much as they do every time something truly offensive happens, whether it’s objectionable news media coverage, a politician’s blunder or a new anti-woman law. But, unlike most Internet outrage, feminist Internet outrage gets results. And it will give the Clinton campaign—and Hillary supporters—a weapon they did not have last time around.
At long last, it’s time for the hating and enabling of hatred of women—and of that woman—to stop. And Hillary 2016 is that time.
Chapter Thirteen
The Coming Battle
Over the course of this book, we’ve explored the ongoing political arms race between the left and the right—detailing the evolution of the political and media landscape, exposing how the conservative movement plots to distort facts and smear its opponents, and explaining how we’ve built a progressive infrastructure that can effectively play both defense and offense.
We’ve met the billionaire Koch brothers who sponsor disinformation campaigns, the right-wing talking heads who serve as their puppets, and the truth tellers who toil in obscurity every day in an attempt to correct the record.
We’ve seen how sleazy scandalmongers in the conservative media push phony wares into the mainstream, and how even reputable members of the press are seduced into legitimizing them.
And we’ve looked at the likely strategies that Hillary Clinton’s Republican opponents will employ as they jockey for advantage in the Twitter era.
There’s only one actor whose role in this drama we haven’t discussed: you.
There are a variety of ways in which you can choose to participate in the 2016 presidential campaign, from volunteering your time to donating your money. (And I won’t be the first or the last to urge that, whatever else you do, you make your voice heard by voting—after all, the ballot box is the one place where you and David Koch have the same say.)
But whether you actively decide to engage in the campaign or not, you are a part of this story.
You watch TV. You read the news. You scroll through your Twitter feed and Facebook wall. And, as you do, you make countless decisions every day about what information to seek out, and how to interpret what you see and hear.
Meanwhile, even if you don’t pick up a clipboard and hit the doors for Hillary or some other candidate, you will most certainly be a participant in the debate simply by virtue of having conversations with your fellow citizens at family gatherings, around the watercooler, and on social media.
Indeed, simply talking to the people in your life about politics is one of the most powerful forms of activism there is. And the first step in making sure you’re using that power for good is becoming an educated consumer of political information.
This leads me to a common frustration among most voters—even those who don’t engage much in politics at all: It’s hard to know where you can go to find news you can really trust. As we’ve discussed, this isn’t really a concern for conservatives, who largely tend to be interested in “news” that validates their existing worldview. But the rest of us want to know that we’re getting the real story—not only are we concerned with whether a story is factually accurate, we want to know that it represents the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
Trying to figure out what you should read or watch to be well informed, then, can be as aggravating as trying to figure out what you should eat to be healthy: You could read a million treatises on journali
stic ethics in the digital age, when all you really want to know is whether or not it’s okay to have eggs for breakfast.
Unfortunately, I don’t have any easy answers for you. The Brock News Diet, if you will, isn’t a white list of sources you can blindly trust, but rather a way of approaching the information smorgasbord that confronts you every time you turn on the TV or open your browser. (Think of the writer Michael Pollan’s advice: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”)
Of course, it’s often easy to spot the worst of the junk. If it comes sandwiched between pieces of fried chicken, wrapped in greasy paper, and handed to you through a drive-through window, it’s probably not good for you—like right-wing blogs or Rush Limbaugh. I’m not saying you should avoid right-wing media at all costs (it can be a great way to spot the next phony scandal before it breaks into the mainstream media), but moderation is advised, and, as with fast food, you should be mindful of what overexposure can do to your blood pressure.
The greater challenge comes in discerning the nutritional content of information you find in the mainstream media—and, as with food, you have to read the label carefully and know what to watch out for.
And that can be tricky. The New York Times is the most well-respected outlet in American journalism, the newspaper of record, but, as we’ve seen, they’ve proven to be wildly unreliable when it comes to the Clintons. With few exceptions, my rule of thumb will be to take nothing the Times reports about the Clintons during the 2016 race at face value. Some of the reporting will stand up to the extra scrutiny, but as we’ve already seen, a good deal of it won’t.
While cable networks can be invaluable for staying on top of breaking news, when it comes to Hillary there is often limited or even negative value to the analysis that tends to fill up their broadcast day.
And the problem isn’t just on Fox. Be prepared for even some avowedly progressive commentators to try to instigate a symbolic challenge to Hillary in the Democratic primary. Or, at least, to get airtime and attention for themselves at Hillary’s expense. Know what this is when you see it, and don’t take it as a reflection of widely held progressive views on Hillary, who remains formidable and popular across all sectors of the party.
This isn’t exactly revolutionary advice—the Michael Pollan version might be: “Read widely. Trust your instincts. Ask questions.” But the truth is that there’s no best source for news, just best practices for consuming it. Reporters and editors take the facts and make choices about how to present them to readers—and sometimes, they make the wrong choices.
The more you know about the kind of journalistic flaws catalogued in this book—both malfeasance on the part of right-wing operators and misfeasance on the part of mostly well-intentioned reporters—and the more you read with a critical eye, the easier it will become for you to reverse engineer those choices, intuiting what’s really going on behind the story.
This is especially true, and especially important, when it comes to Hillary Clinton.
As we’ve seen, the Clinton rules often lead to good journalists producing bad journalism—and if readers aren’t aware of this factor and able to adjust their sensors to account for it, they can be suckered, too.
When the New York Times story about Hillary’s use of a private e-mail account broke, it seemed like a solid and damaging hit. And while its central claims would eventually fall apart, how many people—how many of Hillary’s supporters—drew the conclusion that she had done something wrong before the story could be subjected to critical scrutiny? How many shared that conclusion in the kind of casual conversations, both online and off, I mentioned earlier? How many of their friends and family members who weren’t plugged in enough to read the follow-up coverage might still believe that Hillary was guilty of something?
And how much damage has been done to her image by negative stereotypes that, had there been the progressive infrastructure to fight back against the lies that began to be spun about her back when I was a right-wing hit man, might never have penetrated into the American consciousness? As you talk about the election with people, you may hear them casually refer to Hillary as conniving, or manipulative, or aloof—where did that come from?
You also might hear the sexist jibe that Hillary is “too ambitious” to be president. Ask yourself: Who has ever won the presidency without the ambition to do so?
Your mission, then, should you choose to accept it, is twofold.
First: Help fight back against the lies we’ve already identified—the fake scandals, the false accusations, the groundless innuendo.
When your Fox-watching uncle cracks a joke about Hillary “wiping her e-mail server,” remind him that she complied with every law and statute, that she went above and beyond the transparency obligations she had as a federal employee, that we still haven’t seen one e-mail of Colin Powell’s and likely never will, and that the entire story aided Republicans desperate for a new angle on the Benghazi hoax.
Speaking of Benghazi, don’t be fooled by conservatives on Twitter who still think there’s a bottom to be gotten to—it’s nothing but the bottom-feeding of the Benghazi hoaxsters. After ten congressional committees, dozens of briefings, countless hearings, and millions spent on investigations, we now know for sure that there was no stand-down order preventing rescuers from saving the day, no “critical cables” proving that Hillary denied requests for increased security, no conspiracy to conceal the true motive behind the attack, no evidence of any wrongdoing whatsoever on her part. Hillary did what leaders should do: First, she took responsibility, and then she took action with an eye to preventing future attacks.
When your coworker insists that all Hillary did as secretary of state was fly around shaking hands, bring up her lengthy list of accomplishments: laying the groundwork for tough sanctions on Iran, that pressed the country to agree to the historic nuclear deal, negotiating the cease-fire in Gaza, the successful pivot to Asia and the opening of Burma, economic statecraft that brought hundreds of thousands of jobs to America, and her paradigm-shifting leadership on issues affecting women and girls around the world. Most of all, remind your friend just how low America’s reputation in the world had sunk under George W. Bush and how high it soared on Hillary’s watch.
When your neighbor rolls her eyes at the thought that Hillary might be able to identify with working-class Americans, remind her that Hillary grew up middle class, that she has worked her entire life since the age of thirteen, that she has focused on kitchen-table issues affecting children and families her whole career, that she and Bill weren’t wealthy until late in their lives, and when they did become so, they devoted themselves to philanthropy.
And when that philanthropy comes under attack, don’t be afraid to present the facts about the Clinton Foundation. You’ll be in the company of Clinton Foundation supporters like Mitt Romney, the Bush family, John McCain, and other conservative leading lights—and you’ll be able to talk about the good work the Foundation has done to cure disease, alleviate poverty, and promote the interests of low-income people the world over. And when you hear false attacks about a quid pro quo, you’ll be able to say with confidence that Rupert Mudoch’s Wall Street Journal, among others, has concluded that there’s never been any evidence of impropriety.
When a progressive friend bemoans the lack of a challenge from Hillary’s left, ask him what issue such a candidate could run on. Remind him that this is a woman who penned a progressive vision of the social compact, It Takes A Village—twenty years ago. Talk about how Hillary stood with Elizabeth Warren in creating a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, how she had an aggressive plan to take on Wall Street and close tax loopholes for the wealthy long before it was cool, how she has fought her entire political career for equal pay and universal health care. Or just invite him to listen to her make the case for paid sick leave, immigration reform, LGBT equality, or any number of progressive priorities on the stump—including gun control.
And, for Pete’s sake, don’t put up with sexist attack
s that would never be leveled against a male candidate—not from right-wing bloviators, not from smug cable pundits, and not from your friends and family.
Remind them that Hillary is so “calculating” that, against all political advice, she went to Beijing and declared that “human rights are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights.” That was twenty years ago, too. And remember, these sexist attacks betray an ideology that seeks not just to hold back one woman, but to hold all women back.
Be bold. Be aggressive. Be confident. Be willing to step up—even if it means having Fox News make fun of your hair. As someone who has endured more than his fair share of slings and arrows because I’ve been willing to defend Hillary, I can tell you that there isn’t one instance where I’ve regretted standing up for her.
Of course, by the time this book goes to print, there will no doubt be some “new” story about Hillary filtering up from the conservative oppo shop into the mainstream media. And, at first glance, it may well look damaging. You may be tempted to freak out. And then, soon enough, you will find that it was just another right-wing smear. Remember, you’ve seen it all before.
It’s not too much to say that the never-ending barrage of misinformation and negativity directed against Hillary and Bill Clinton by the media could decide the 2016 election. Unfortunately I don’t have much hope that the press will wise up to the propaganda it’s being fed by the right; chasing the white whale of a real Clinton scandal is too irresistible. Indeed, as this book went to press, Dylan Byers, the astute media writer for Politico, reported that “the national media has never been more primed to take down Hillary Clinton (and, by the same token, elevate a Republican).”